Thursday, May 20, 2010

Last week I outlined the general necessity of whittling down your plot to one sentence, one paragraph, and two paragraph pitches in order to give yourself a head start on the literally thousands of times you are going to need to summarize your work over the course of a book's lifetime.

Today I want to zero in on the one sentence pitch.

Caveat time: I don't want to oversell the importance of a one sentence pitch. It's really not something that is going to sink or float your book. A good pitch is not going to mean your book gets published and a bad pitch doesn't mean your book won't get published.

At the same time, the one sentence pitch as the core of all the summarizing you're going to do in the future. It's the heart of your book, whittled down to one sentence. It's what you build around when crafting longer pitches.

And there's an art to it.

There are three basic elements in a good one sentence pitch:

- The opening conflict (called the Inciting Incident by Robert McKee)
- The obstacle
- The quest

The quest can be a physical or interior journey, but it's what happens to the character(s) between the moment when the plot begins and ends. The opening conflict is the first step in that quest. It's how the journey begins. The obstacle is what stands in the way of that journey.

The resulting very basic pitch is: When OPENING CONFLICT happens to CHARACTER(s), they have OVERCOME CONFLICT to COMPLETE QUEST. There are lots different ways of structuring these basic elements, but they should be there.

The important thing to remember is that a good pitch is a description of what actually happens. It's a one sentence description of the plot, not the theme.

The danger of describing the theme in your pitch instead of the actual plot is that it invariably sounds generic. The pitch of Eat Pray Love is not "A recently divorced woman searches for love and happiness." That sounds like, well, a million books published every year. A better pitch would be "A recently divorced woman travels to Italy for pleasure, India for spirituality, and Bali for balance, but she finds love instead." That's what actually happens.

The last key element is a dash of flavor: anything you can do to flesh out your pitch with some key details that give a sense of the character of your novel (funny, scary, intense, tragic, etc.) will go a long way to giving the recipient of the pitch a sense of its unique personality.

I am by no means suggesting that I have a perfect one sentence pitch and will not be winning any pitch awards any time soon, but I have tried my best to live by the philosophy I have detailed above:

Three kids trade a corndog (FLAVOR) for a spaceship, blast off into space (OPENING CONFLICT), accidentally break the universe (OBSTACLE), and have to find their way back home (QUEST)

Once you have your one sentence pitch down pat the rest of your descriptions will be gravy. On corndogs. Yum.

Love your one-sentence pitch for JACOB WONDERBAR! And I agree about EAT, PRAY, LOVE. A couple of days ago, I saw a trailer for the movie that mentioned those three key elements of the book (although, since it was a movie trailer, there was more than one sentence). I’ve seen the book cover a gazillion times, but once I realized the story was about three types of very interesting travel experiences, I immediately purchased the book.

Thanks for breaking down the three key steps in writing a one-sentence pitch. That’s very helpful!

And I'd like to add that working out your one sentence pitch can be an important writing and revision tool. Being able to identify the core elements of your novel can help you stay focused during the writing process, and helps you identify unnecessary elements during the revision process. At least, that's what it's been doing for me this week! And that goes for all forms of writing, I think, from lengthy novels right down to 32-page picture books.

Awesome post. You are the first person to actually explain how to write a pitch. Most people simply suggest to go look at the one line in bold print on the back of the book. I literally went to a book store and took pictures of these one liners with my IPhone. I went home and studied them and still felt lost. I really needed this post. I'm going to print it out and keep it in my notebook :)

Well said and I appreciate the pointers! I am a professional recruiter (Disney) and I always conclude interviews with candidates by asking them the simple question, Who Are You? There are a lot of similarities to what you wrote that I look for in a one sentence pitch/response from a candidate and it's nice to see the overlap.

Thank you so much for this. I have been struggling with this for weeks, and then I read this, sat down and banged out something that encapsulates my WIP perfectly. (Ok, I banged it out, then had to edit it 4 times). But it works now! Thanks!!

It depends on the genre, but usually it would still be as much as possible about what happens. But if it's a particular subject matter, yeah, it could be the subject and the angle, if that makes sense.

Nathan, you darling man, thanks for posting on this topic. It's the subject of #ScribeChat, the weekly chat for writers on Twitter this evening (6 pm PT/9 pm ET). I was going to write a post to introduce the topic on The ScribeChat Review but have been feeling like death warmed up all day. If you have no objections, I'll do a short intro and link to your post here instead, as you've done such a great job, as always!

The one-sentence pitch is a truly valuable tool. I found myself sitting next to an editor from a major publishing house at dinner during the Big Sur Workshop and when she asked what I was writing I used a quick pitch, not wanting to bore her, and as I left at the end of the meal she asked me to submit it to her.

At the SCBWI conference a film manager asked me for what the movie industry calls a logline (the one sentence pitch) and liked it enough to request a one page synopsis.

But four years ago, when I first started writing this book, I couldn't have done it. Sometimes you have to know your book very well before you can identify the heart of it.

This is great - you explained it in very clear, simple terms - very readable and easy to apply. Thank you!

I'm wondering - could this translate to queries? It seems like the synopsis part is the most difficult for folks, and that's what this is - especially the two paragraph pitch. If so, this approach could help with what is the hardest part of the query.

I was dreading the idea of writing a one sentence pitch but the tips you gave have made it kind of fun. Not corndog-quality kind of fun, but definitely more fun than I originally anticipated. Thanks, as always, for the excellent advice!

For BREAK, my one sentence pitch has always been, "Jonah is on a mission to break all his bones." It doesn't have the elements you mentioned, but it's enough to make people go "What the--!?" which is one way to peak interest!

I'm having sort of the same problem, neurotype, although I'm trying to go more mainstream than literary. But I have three POV characters, each of whom has her own quest. The quests all collide fairly soon, but I'm having a really hard time zeroing in on the "quest" part of the formula. For me the one and two paragraph pitches were much easier. I came up with about eight different one-sentence pitches, all of which I thought sounded good, but none of which actually captured the heart of the novel.

That said, the exercise itself helped me to clarify the catalytic event and some fuzziness in the characters' motivations, so THANKS!

A great post, Nathan. As someone who is going to have start marketing my debut novel in the next few months, I have been trying hard to come up with the one-sentence pitch and the mention of "flavor" is a helpful one.

Friends or booksellers--everybody wants to know: What's the book about? Of course they do--but funny how it ends up being a challenge to articulate it in a concise way.

A young girl is kidnapped, and instead of destroying her life, the crime saves her and hundreds of others.

Boo hiss!

My new one-line pitch:

When a reluctant psychic (FLAVOR) kidnaps a three-year-old girl (OPENING CONFLICT), an FBI agent fights to keep the kidnapper free (OBSTACLE) in hopes she will lead the Bureau to a stolen cache of explosives (QUEST).

When struggling novelist Sean Keating finds out the best way for a debut author to get published is through non-fiction, he decides to writing about love, something he knows nothing about…until he reunites with his prom date.

This is excellent -- thanks! I recently read a literary agent's advice to never use the names of characters in a query letter. It's distracting. What do you think of that, and also, what about in a one-sentence-pitch?

I followed this link from your site to a blog and then a website. It offers the long form in free e-bookhttp://www.writeagreatquery.com/

I decided to add a new five pages to my opening, very reluctantly; at first, but I think I was able to marry an active opening that makes my protagonists motivations and quest extremely clear to a follow on segment that logically and hypnotically engages in world building that seems: "this could be possible."I have your formula suggestions and breakdown of your plot sequence as the practical intro to that longer ebook.

Its a tough task but I accept it is essential. Maybe you could cover suspension of disbelief and first three chapters in the future. Thx N.

3.)The atomized obliteration of the United States of America in 2012 can only be stopped by the person who originally ignited the conflagration that engulfed all of mankind; Quantum Physicist and Nobel Laureate Dr. Pierce Daniels.

Great post Nathan. I think a one sentence pitch helps the writer focus on the through plot to see if it has enough meat. I love loglines anyway so I always try and describe my WIP in a single sentence.

Long time reader, first time poster. This is not related to the current blog post, but as someone who clearly enjoy filmed drama and children's literature, I felt I would be amiss if I didn't wise you to a guy making "Golden Books" style pages out of classic (R-rated) movie scenes: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2010/05/golden_books_th.htmlfor a gallery of them, check out:http://kotaku.com/5540330/these-golden-books-are-not-for-children/gallery/(He already has a book deal)

This is such good advice, not only for being able to tell a top class agent you have the luck to meet in the lift at a writing conference why it's imperative that he should read your book, but also to guide you when you're doing those last few vital edits before submitting the manuscript. It would keep you focused and might even make you realise you aren't quite on the right track. Thank you so much.

Since I am already posting irrelevent links, I think you might also enjoy the next link on Brainiac (a wonderful little blog that the Boston Globe puts out): Adult authors who write children's books... and how to get them.

I'm not fond of deep-fried cornbread-wrapped weiners on a stick, but then I'm not partial to traditional carnival foods. I've preferred beer and then booze. Even those delights are denied me now. The one constant from childhood that remains my favorite, savoring the flavors of interpersonal and group interaction dynamics. People as inciters, flavors, obstacles, quests.

As usual your post is very helpful. The examples are a great guide we can build on. Now we simply have to make our stories sound dynamic, intriguing and heart felt in one sentence. Thank you for showing it can be done.

I read a book on script writing that mandated starting with your logline before you even begin writing the story. When you know what your story is about, it's much easier to decide between potential subplots and character choices.

Thanks, Nathan. I thought I had my one-sentence pitch down until I read this. But I'd stated the quest too generically. Once I made the quest specific to my novel-in-progress, I realized something I hadn't before: the protagonist's quest in her personal life is mirrored in her professional life. Thanks for the inspiration!

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